One of the ways that enthusiasts squeeze all the juice out of their processors is overclocking: an attempt to improve performance by raising frequencies and voltages to the limits of the system. There is also another way – lowering the voltage to lower the temperature and increase the thermal reserve (and reduce power consumption). AMD engineers have worked in this direction.
Any chip has a minimum voltage at which it normally operates at a given frequency. Most modern processors have significant headroom in this regard. Lower operating voltages also mean lower power consumption or additional options for higher overclocking, which is why manufacturers use various methods to force processor cores to operate at the lowest possible voltage. Despite this, there is always the possibility of more aggressive voltage management: manufacturers have to rely on their algorithms for millions of processors with a margin. And specific users can go further to optimize the algorithm for their own crystal.
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The new AMD Curve Optimization tool, which will be supported in firmwares starting with AGESA 1180 in BIOS updates for 400 and 500 series motherboards, is designed specifically for user voltage tracking. The goal of the tool is to reduce stress in minimum and maximum load scenarios as much as possible, but instead of just applying a fixed voltage bias across the full range, the technology will use internal sensors (workload, temperature, and so on) to adapt the voltage across as needed. With the AMD tool, the processor can change the voltage up to 1000 times per second.
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Curve Optimization will be part of AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive 2 technology suite, meaning it will void your hardware warranty, but AMD knows that some users love overclocking or undervoltage and want to get the most out of their hardware. The company said this adaptive methodology will improve performance in both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads, as opposed to standard voltage variation, which the company says is effective only in multi-threaded tasks.
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The settings will allow you to test to what extent the adaptive undervoltage is allowed in mono. AMD has configured this feature so that the user can choose how many “steps” he is willing to step down. Each such step corresponds to 3-5 millivolts, and the maximum value is 30 steps. This means that by setting 10 steps, the voltage will decrease by 30-50 millivolts, depending on the workload and wherever the control circuit deems it appropriate.
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AMD estimates that this new method could provide an additional 2% improvement in single-threaded performance or 10% in multi-threaded performance for the Ryzen 9 5900X processor. AMD has stated that this method will be supported on all future processors from the company, but will not appear on the Ryzen 3000, as it requires some engineering optimizations that cannot be carried over.
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Initially, users will be able to enable Curve Optimizer via BIOS, and next year AMD will add the tool to AMD Ryzen Master utility for Windows. On some motherboards, this function is already present in the AGESA 1100 firmware, but the official deployment will take place after the update to AGESA 1180 – the corresponding firmware will begin to appear for various motherboards in early December.
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